Review: Jeff Sharlet's C-Street

I just finished Jeff Sharlet’s follow-up to The Family. I’m sitting on a plane on my way to Ireland and I just devoured about half the book. While I don’t read much fiction anymore because I find so little of it compelling, it still always amazes me when a piece of nonfiction can be as or more gripping than a novel. Perhaps its an old prejudice from younger days—kid’s nonfiction is a terrible genre—that I have not managed to erase even after years of higher education. Even years in which, possessed for a passion by various books or articles, my friends would sit long hours debating into the night or call each other excitedly to find out whether someone else had read the same passage. I remember one sleep deprived semester planning to read only the first five pages of an article by – and staying up to finish it. The same article caused two friends of mine, who had spent the night in the classics lounge working and taking brief naps to regenerate, to bound out to greet my professor, bouncing in excitement, before our 8am class. Non-fiction certainly can inspire, but my gut tells me that it usually doesn't.

I may not be jumping up-and-down—I’m pretty sure that I would get chastised by the flight attendants—but I have to say that this book not just appealed to me but it impassioned me. After 2 hours of sleep, 1 hour of airport delay, and 3 hours of flying, I’m still writing this review and that in itself should speak volumes. This book is wild.

Back in the days of the John Ensign and Mark Sanford scandals I became very interested in C-Street. I heard Jeff Sharlet speaking on the Rachel Maddow show and I instantly wanted to buy his book. What appealed to me was not the hypocrisy of a Christian movement that hid and even helped the adultery of its adherents and leaders, but that a group of prominent officials could create a fundamentalist prayer cell meant to alter the way that they did government work in a country under the first amendment.

Perhaps even more, I was intrigued because I had come up with a similar idea for a novel. I was reading some Greek texts by one of the oligarchists—Xenephon, maybe, or Heraclitus, I don’t remember—and I came up with an idea about a modern oligarchic movement. Thinking back to the political writings of Chomsky that I read when I was in high school and the takeover of the democratic system by elites who manipulated the media and electoral process for their own undemocratic ends, I considered what would happen if this idea was taken wide-scale. I thought to myself, what if a group secretly began placing a number of crypto-conservatives into powerful positions in government and companies around the world preparing for an eventual takeover and essentially conservative revolution (however much of an oxymoron that idea might e). But my idea wasn’t compelling—conservatives, at least how it exists in the United States today does not inspire the devotion for a secret brotherhood like that. Then, right on television, Jeff Sharlet articulated the missing link: fundamentalism.

The Family is a fundamentalist Christian fellowship that does precisely that—they infiltrate the highest positions in government and other powerful institutions in order to network and spread their agenda. At first, it seemed like it couldn’t be true, but after vague and evasive quotes from members of the organization, I finally realized that it was absolutely true. I read The Family last year and I really enjoyed it. The exploration of the topic was deft and provided the necessary facts while giving an objective—sometimes unnervingly so—account of the operation.

The problem, however, with The Family, is that it got bogged down. Sharlet, wanting to give the full history of this insidious institution in American politics got bogged down in the details. Too many of the founders were striking men with blond hair and blue eyes described in almost exactly the same words. While one can’t change history to make it more varied, one can attempt to couch one’s narrative differently in order to keep reader interest. While I found the book fascinating, it didn’t stick as well as I would have liked in my memory and I didn’t pursue my research farther.

One day, browsing on Amazon, I noticed that Jeff Sharlet wrote another book. I put it on my Amazon wishlist, but I didn’t pay it as much heed as I might have. I was more interested in this book because it was called C-Street and so, I assumed, it would focus on the political aspects of the movement and the way in which the C-Streeters influenced American policy. He delivered. This book is an amazing chronicle of the way in which the fundamentalist contingent—specifically the family—influence American policymaking both foreign and domestic. The group’s influence runs even deeper than I anticipated and their issues are those which now appear on the forefront of America’s social battles: abortion, women’s rights, and homosexuality.

This book is magnificently written. Sharlet divides it into chapters based on the Family’s principles and each section blends politics, history, and interview. It’s gripping. Perhaps, in some sense, I have fallen prey to what Sharlet calls the problem of the American attention span. He argues that people are much more interested in sex scandals than they are in the family’s support of genocidal regimes. It did indeed take the Ensign and Sanford cases to bring C-Street to my attention. However, I hope that I have proven myself a more worthy reader than that. I found the chapter entitled “The War” to be the most engaging and almost as terrifying as the sections on the Ugandan kill-the-gays bill and on foreign policy more generally. “The War” detailed the rise of fundamentalism in the American military. The combination of superiors using their position to indoctrinate servicemen and the anti-Semitism detailed in this chapter was absolutely shocking. You have to read it to believe it.

Ultimately, I think this book was fantastic and that everyone everywhere should read it. The idea of Christian evangelicalism using government positions and advocating on blatantly elitist principles—they refer to these people as the “up-and-out”—is something that should be investigated and brought to the forefront of the public consciousness, especially since the American taxpayer is paying for a lot of the trips during which senators attempt to evangelicalize leaders of other nations—especially the poor and corrupt—is something everyone needs to ponder. Also, the writing is concise and powerful.

I’m planning on reading The Family again. Maybe on the flight home. I think I'm going to try to sleep on this next leg of the flight.

The Hunger Games

Unlike everyone else, I had my last final on Monday so my spring break was cut a little bit short. However, I managed to put the break to good use and spend a lot of time hanging out out with friends and not getting any sleep. Unfortunately, I caught a cold from my insane lifestyle for the past few days which involved lots of friends and wine and visiting a couple of museums and even a spa. Classes start again on Tuesday. In the meantime, I promised one of my tutoring students that I would read the The Hunger Games because she was shocked and appalled that I had not yet read it.

I decided I didn't want to buy the book so I check out the ability to borrow a book from Amazon that is one of the new feature of Amazon prime. It actually works really well with novels and I think that I am going to really enjoy this capacity during the summer. I just borrowed the second book.

In general, I don't think the The Hunger Games is particularly fantastic. It kept me awake and reading while I've been sick, but it's neither particularly well written or particularly gripping. It surprises me that it is such a hit, because it does not have the magical world of Harry Potter or anything. But maybe the second installment will prove more fascinating...

Nox, A Review

I just finished Anne Carson's Nox, which was a Christmas gift from one of our oldest family friends and his wonderful girlfriend who is a famous novelist. On the back of the "book," Carson describes her work thus: "When my brother died, I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get." I put the word "book" in quotations marks because this work is not, strictly speaking, a book. It is, rather, a box with a fold out visual-and-prose poem and at the same time, an associative reading of Catullus 101.

The Catullus poem is beautiful, as is Anne Carson's work. While being a poem and a journey in grief, it is also a character study and a postmodern novel; the readers must flesh out the complicated lives of the characters through (often literal) fragments. It is an engaging read which develops a sort of ethos of sadness as well as a desire for inquiry.

I don't want to spoil it; I suggest you read it. Her work is wonderful.

Slightly Ill Meditations on Textbooks

Although I have been taking good care of myself (sleep, veggies, fruits, vitamins, Greek, scholarship, a little Latin, etc), my cold seems to have relapsed and I feel rather ill. Consequently, my understanding of the world (as it always does when I am distracted by a painful throat, the sniffles, etc, declines rather sharply. Although I struggled through both some Crito and even a poem by Catullus this afternoon (110), my ability to effectively take in information sharply declined after a long art history lecture in a darkened room. As such, instead of continuing with Plato, Homer, or even reading Zuckert for my research, I have been reading a textbook.

My only mandatory class for the fall (aside from at least one course in each Greek and Latin) is a seminar on, essentially, how to produce classical scholarship. I am not sure what this entails precisely, although I seem to remember something about producing a term paper, the only book assigned for the class is a recently-published research manual by David Schaps called the Handbook for Classical Research. After I began nodding off while reading Plato's Philosophers (which quite interesting and this demonstrates clearly that I do not feel well), I decided to something with a simpler tone and point: my new textbook.

Like any good textbook, Schaps' work is engaging without being particularly challenging. Schaps has a strong personal style in his writing that is amenable, even if his opinions, at times, can be rather irritating (especially when he presents them as universal sentiments). However, there is something that feels wrong about the book. Although I am only 50 pages into the book, I get the distinct feeling that Classical research is simply not a subject that can be stuffed into the form of a textbook. Furthermore, although Schaps' distinct voice makes the book more engaging that it might be with a more distant author, it also causes me as the reader to constantly question his qualifications for writing such a book. The only place I have heard his is in one brief discussion of ancient coinage. It caused the more cynical part of me to wonder whether he has children to put through college, because certainly a general research handbook is going to sell better than the Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece.

To be sure, there are a lot of things that I still do not know. Until a few days, I had never researched fragments and my examination of the Teubner volume in the library containing Pindar 169a gave me some interesting insights (like how many times Plato's dialogues quote this fragment), but if it indeed contained the information I sought, I did not understand it. I have not gotten to examine Schaps' explanation of research with fragments yet so I do not know if he would be helpful. I certainly could have used this book in high school or early college when, while I had access to them, I did not understand what a commentary was and I sailed through my texts blindly until Propertius II helped me out in my Aeschylus class. Yet, at this moment in my career, I am less in need (for example) of a textbook that explains what scholia is than a textbook that provides a detailed understanding of different types of scholia and how to read them (e.g Ancient Greek Scholarship) or perhaps (more pertinent ant the moment) a detailed monograph on strategies to deal with textual fragments and their sources.

Maybe Schaps refers students to resources like this (I do know that he mentions Eleanor Dickey's book), but even if that were the case, it seems like a fruitless mission to write a book on a topic that is designed only as a chaperone to bigger and better resources instead of writing (or hiring someone else to write) analysis at the level necessary for rigorous undergraduates or less experienced graduate students as the book, by it's very nature (and the assumption made clear in the introduction) is geared solely toward individuals who intend to research and publish in the field. More thoughts as I get farther along (and hopefully as I become more coherent as my cold wains).

Notes 08/17/11: I was thinking that the book was declining further when I came to a chapter entitled "Book Reviews" (Schaps 57-65), but I was impressed to discover that the chapter was not instruction on how to read a book review, but on how to write one that might be accepted by a journal and what types of journals tend to publish them. However, the jury is still out.

Note 08/19/11: Once again I must add a positive addendum to my review. Although I have used many dictionaries in my time as a student of the classics, I still found Schaps' chapter on lexicography illuminating when it came to dictionaries (Schaps 69-80). It was nice to find out that there is a dictionary of Mycenean Greek (although, apparently, the best one is in Spanish) and that Woodhouse is the only full English-Classical Greek dictionary around, but other smaller ones, such as one by by James Morwood (good to know for prose composition).

Primordial Musings

Yesterday, I read an incredible article on jellyfish in the New York Times. I realized that they were a primitive life form, but I had no idea that they were three times older than the first dinosaurs and had survived five mass extinctions. The article is quite fabulous and I highly suggest it to anyone interested at all in marine biology.

Infinite Summer: This is my fourth (?) day of Infinite Jest, and I still have little good to say about it. I feel slightly less in the dark than before because some of the characters have been given names instead of obscure nicknames which makes them significantly more identifiable. My greatest compliment for it is that it is is more articulate and sophisticated in verbal style than the stories to which I have been comparing it (Oy, The Dogfish Series), but, on the other hand, "The Dogfish who Swallowed the Universe" was written by a twelve-year-old.

Speaking of primordial, I reread "The Dogfish who Swallowed the Universe" today, after my Infinite Jest allotment. I realized that I glamorized the story significantly because I spent so many hours of my formative youth arguing over it [1] with it's author (who, for convenience, I will refer to as Sockhead [2]). I was even inspired to write a similar work of my own around the same age that was a historical and religious parody instead of a social commentary. However, there is still a life and a humor in it that is not only precocious, but still holds up to this day.

"So it was that a cluster of naive lunatics met in a pub" (DSU. 1) and the story is off describing each of the characters. I wanted to quote one of the funniest sections, but most of them require references from earlier in the work to make sense or included a set up that was simply more than I wanted to type out. One vignette-like struck me as amusing. It lacks the subtlety and humor of other scenes (in fact it isn't particularly funny) and the writing lacks a degree of verbal artistry built up in the sequels "Hell Heck" and "Trousers," but in a stand-alone moment it provided a snapshot of the staccato absurdest style that reminds me of Infinite Jest.

"We decided to walk to a place we had sighted on the way to the inn, two or three blocks away. It was a Liberian fast-good pub called Ye Olde Liberian Fast-Food Pub. All of the rooms had themes. Our table was in the "fluffy fire-hose room." Our waiter looked like a cross between a stereotypical caffeine-addict and a stereotypical boy scout. He introduced himself as John and promptly died. I guess Abilio Manuel Guerra Junqueiro was correct. The manager said our waiter was under some stress because there had been a lot of complaints directed toward him. When I asked why, he said that John was more than a waiter; he was also a curator. He curated the rooms. He was criticized for putting stratified rocks in the ocean room. He thought that all stratified rocks came from the ocean. I guess he trusted Abraham Gottlob Werner's theories too much." (DSU 6).

Maybe my problem is that as much as I appreciate parts of Infinite Jest, I find it rather joyless and have not laughed or even cracked a smile at those things which I believe are supposed to be funny. While silly and unrefined, I found myself smiling and laughing at "The Dogfish who Swallowed the Universe." I am certainly a proponent of dark humor, but joyless humor seems like an oxymoron.

Endnotes

1. The story at once a bizarre fantasy, an exercise in humor, and a social parody of our social group. Any understanding of social dynamics I possess came from discussing, nitpicking, and expanding the social commentary from this book. My interests in social dynamics became so focused that in "Hell Heck" (the second story) my character was described thus: "Gruiforms had sort of become a "watcher." She merely watched (and watched and watched)" (HH 2). Obviously, my opinions are skewed.
2. At the time when this story was written, the author of the story constantly wore an eccentric gray beanie (for lack of a better term) which, when not being worn, looked a bit like a sock. This vague resemblance caused the author to refer to himself as "Sockhead" when some pseudonym was required.

Infinite Summer

 

Twitter recently alerted me to a project called Infinite Summer, which is a blog project that guides individuals through David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest during the summer. I think that the idea is that Infinite Jest is a "hard" novel, by virtue of it's length and plethora of endnotes, and that people need guidance. I need guidance, rather, because I often find it difficult to stick with fiction because I often find non-fiction much more interesting. At least four of my friends have recommended Infinite Jest to me, so I thought I should try it. I have read just over the 1% required to start (I am using the % because I do not have page numbers in the kindle edition) and I am following the Index of Guiding Posts. I am going to try to stick with it.

Initial Thoughts: I am not a huge fan thus far. To me, the book reminds me of a combination between Kurt Vonnegut, Dave Berry, and mild nausea. To be fair, the last one may change tomorrow-- I happened to spend a large portion of today moderately nauseated. Actually, the closest thing to Infinite Jest that I have read was a series of three short stories my best friend from elementary wrote called Oy, the Dogfish Series, which was impossibly clever. I know this is going to sound like it's stretching credulity but I have a feeling that this friend may have read a portion of Infinite Jest because of the similarities in the style. This is the same person who, in fifth grade, goaded me into following his path reading Animal Farm, 1984, Lord of the Flies, Lord of the Rings, and various other novels usually over the head of kids that age (many of which I did not understand until years later). What may seem even more absurd is that I actually like "The Dogfish that Swallowed the Universe" and it's sequels significantly better thus far because voice of the narrator was more charming even with the same verbal gestures that I have observed thus far in Infinite Jest. This may be part of why I was not an English major.

Book Review: Life From Scratch

I downloaded Life from Scratch for free from Amazon a few days ago. After reading a couple of scholarly article on the last exam I proctored, I decided to switch to something lighter. It was a quick and easy read. I finished it in a total of 3-4 hours.

I started reading the book in the first place because I thought the idea of resurrecting a life through cooking (kind of like I did-- although i did mine by Sparkpeople with exercise and healthy cooking) sounded interesting to me-- I did not look closely enough to realize that it was not a true story. However, I quickly realized the story was fictional (due to timeline irregularities). In general, it was a vapid account of two-dimensional characters that ended in a totally unrealistic and trite manner. I would not particularly recommend it.

Book Review: The Alchemist

 

Yes, I know, everyone else read this book ten years ago. Recently I picked it off my bookshelf as my I-need-a-five-minute-break book. It worked pretty well-- an easy to follow storyline and short chapters made it the ideal momentary break from the world.

I cannot say that I highly recommend the book. It had some of the elements of Spanish writing that I seem to like-- that fantastical gifted phrasing that makes words seem magical-- but it lacked a complicated plot or believable characters. Every person seemed to have a unified core that appeared unmediated through their actions with the world almost as if the main character had invented them to entertain him during long nights in the desert. Furthermore, although the character went through some hardships, I do not think I have ever encountered a self-discovery story where the path was so clear or the journey so easy. Maybe this is my view from reading too many books where authors torture their characters, but it seems like omens/God/happenstance/luck (all things to which the main character's first person narrative constantly refer) provide such easy roadmaps.

The book was enjoyable and moderately charming, but not something I could highly recommend.

Confessions of a Snob: Two Book Reviews

I recently acquired two bread books: Tartine Bread (from which I have attempted one partially-successful bread) and The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I am going to review both of the books and include a few comments about the value of the books and what I have learned from each of them.

Tartine Bread is fantastic. I recommend it most highly as an exceptional bread book. Unlike the science background present in Peter Reinhart's books (especially Whole Grain Breads-- which is great), Chad Robertson introduces bread as more of a narrative. While Reinhart bombards his reader with science, while claiming to want to form a "spirit-of-the-law baker" (Reinhart BBA), Robertson uses pictures, notes about texture, and anecdotes to push his reader toward a more intuitive grasp of bread baking. I do love the baking science, but Tartine Bread manages to do something different that is also fabulous. The writing is engaging and the pictures are beautiful. Sadly, just over half of the book is bread recipes (although the recipes which he does include seem well worth it) and the rest of the book is taken up with recipes for day-old bread, many of which are not to my liking. I would have gladly given up some of the recipes for more variations on formulae or more of Robertson's commentary, but at least the french onion soup recipe looks fantastic (minus the duck fat).

I also learned three vital lessons from Tartine Bread. I am sure that there will be more lessons as I continue to practice this bread, but these are the first three.
For fermentation: bread can rise in a warm, moist environment if you put it in a closed space (like an oven) with a pot of boiling water and this will safely decrease the time it takes for the bread to rise (as I mentioned previously).
For fermentation: There are negative consequences to letting bread rise for too long. According the commentary section, "if you let bulk fermentation go too long, the final rise will be sluggish as the food that fuels the fermentation has been exausted. The glutensin the dough also begin defrading after a certain point due to increasing acidity, which results in a tighter, more uniform crumb"  (Italics are mine. Robertson 75). Although he is speaking about wild yeast, I am almost positive this was part of the problem with my attempt at a 70% White Whole Wheat Pain de Campagne.
For baking: Home ovens, even with methods like Reinhart's Double Steaming method (Reinhart 92-93). This is the reason that I have had so much trouble with inconsistent oven spring, especially since I started using the convection setting on my oven. Modern home ovens are designed to vent steam and the remaining moisture is not sufficient for the necessary oven spring (Robertson 79). I think this was why my artisan loaves had better crumb at my alma mater: our ovens were terrible, so they did not vent steam adequately. This was great for bread baking. My results here have been significantly compromised by this fact (with the notable exception of two loaves of ciabatta that had wonderful oven spring (but even they sprang very unevenly, yeilding strangely asymmetrical loaves). I will at some point acquire a combo cooker, but for now I will use my oven stone and my overturned broth pot in order to provide and enclosed environment for the number of minutes under steam.

I am making my second loaf of Tartine's Basic Country Bread this weekend (the essential recipe can be found here). Wish me luck!

I have been wanting to own or even see a copy of Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice since about one week into my first attempts to make bread. This book has more hype than any other book I know of in bread-baking circles. I have a confession to make: I don't think it's that great. I like Reinhart's work--I love the two Reinhart books I recieved as gifts: Artisan Breads Every Day from which comes my fantastic pizza recipe and Whole Grain Breads which was my first real introduction to bread science. I am just not a fan and I think it's partially because I am becoming a snob. Here are my following objections:

1. The introduction (Reinhart 1-25) is really self-aggrandizing and annoying. I like bakers talking about their backgrounds (for example, the Introduction to Tartine Bread pages 8-32), but Reinhart just sounds so arrogant.
2. Out of the 40+ recipes, less than 30% are lean doughs (i.e. doughs without sugars or fats added) and only three are with wild yeast. To me, the most impressive thing about bread is the flavor that can be pulled from the simple ingredients of flour, water, and salt without having to add a whole bunch of "rich" ingredients to enhance the flavor. I primarily make enriched breads/rich breads for holidays and I would not want them lying around on a regular basis.
3. Reinhart focuses primarily on machine mixing, unlike in his other two works I mentioned above where he seems to give hand and machine mixing more equal weight. Standing mixers are expensive and sometimes ineffective and they take away the kneading of bread which (I feel) is essential to making bread baking a relaxing and interactive process. Not to be cliche, but I feel like I taste my own labor in a wonderful loaf of bread I kneaded myself, which is why I made the bread instead of buying it. I know some doughs, usually high-gluten doughs, require a machine for adequate mixing, bu many if not most of these doughs can be made just as well by hand.
4. The baking instructions are in ounces. Yes, I know, ounces are a common form of weight measurement. However, grams are much smaller than ounces and weighing by grams on my digital scale is probably more accurate than if I were to weigh the same ingredients in ounces (also, I like using the round numbers rather than e.g. 0.11oz). In Reinhart's later books, he uses volume measures, ounces, and grams which seems like the perfect compromise to me.
5. There is a lot of focus on shaping. I know aesthetics are important, but I would rather have more instruction on how to make the bread taste wonderful than how to shape it into three different variations on a braided loaf. I want my breads to have wonderful flavor hidden in rustic crunch crusts and which reveal a beautiful open crumb-- it doesn't matter to me whether that bread is in a fancy couronne or a simple boule. Furthermore (and probably more importantly) a lot of the shaping instructions are incoherent, either because there are not enough pictures or because they seem to leave out important steps.
6. Finally, if one eats with one's eyes before one's tongue (Reinhart says something along these lines), I cannot imagine why there are not only so few pictures of the crumb of the different breads but so few pictures of the final products. many of these formulae have no pictures at all, which is a little worrying.

Despite my objections, I have found some useful advice in The Bread Baker's Apprentice. For example, I assumed that wonderful open crumb could be achieved in any bread if the baker was skilled enough. Apparently (although I cannot find the page number right now), hydration percentage determines the crumb structure and only higher hydration doughs (60-85%) can produce the irregular large holes that I covet. Furthermore, I now know one of the reasons I sometimes end up with very strange looking (almost marbleized) crust, like on the More Sour Sourdough I made this week. Reinhart explains that one should mist the sides of the oven with water, rather than "wet the dough, which causes splotches" (Reinhart 93). I realized that in my attempt to generate steam, I was misting the dough as well as the oven. Much of the baking science was also helpful: the more I keep the chemical processes in mind, the better my bread can be. I can use this science to help trouble-shoot my bread mistakes. Overall, unless you are a king or queen of enriched doughs or are desperate to try shaping your bread in many different ways, Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day is a better book because it includes the famous Pain a l'ancienne recipe as well as the amazing sourdough pizza recipe, uses grams/ounces/volume, has a great section on slow, cold, fermentation, and provides a useful index of baker's percentages.